‘Are you kidding me?”
The question from a coworker surprised me almost as much as my rooting through a file cabinet in the Record-Eagle basement seemed to stun him. “You’re serious right now. You’re actually using that?”
I was. My assignment that day had me reaching back to events that predated my birth and, unfortunately for a researcher on deadline, our online archives. So I went to a cabinet that I noticed several years earlier, in part because the brand name — Shaw-Walker — caught this former Muskegon Chronicle intern’s name.
Inside were several years’ worth of folders labeled by topic, including a roughly inch-thick sheaf of clippings on Grand Traverse Resort. My coworker’s surprise came in part because he thought no one used this particular piece of our clippings library, but that day, I needed it.
While I didn’t have the ease of typing in a keyword and nearly instantly seeing the results, I did reap the benefit of Record-Eagle employees before me.
One of them, Rick Haglund, not only provided plenty of source material through his blanket coverage but also graciously agreed to share his memories of the late Paul Nine in an interview. Another, whose name I wish I knew, clipped, dated and filed those articles, chief among them a six-page special report he wrote with former staff writer Matt Roush.
Yes, librarians once spared journalists diving into their own paper’s institutional memory the task of flipping through large bound versions one page at a time — a tedious chore that, without a reference date to narrow the search, often proves a waste of time.
Without librarians, paper archives are incredibly unwieldy. Even my own modest cache at home gets misplaced or unsorted, including a printout of the ship’s manifest on which my great-grandmother and her family’s names were penned.
It was to be the inspiration and source material for a column honoring my immigrant ancestors — the Wachoviaks came from Iwno in what is now Poland’s Poznań province and moved to Shamokin, Penn., but the details are scribbled on a piece of paper that eludes me for the moment (soon, reader).
Searching through hard copies used to be such a common task that the Yellow Pages even used the gesture as its logo. Watching “The Day of the Jackal” stunned this child of the 1980s, not just because of the thrilling plot but also to see how much effort it took to search through massive stores of data in a hurry. Currently, the number of keystrokes required is smaller than the number of people it once took.
Now, we must take care of our own hard copies. It can be a drudging task, but if we don’t do it, we lose track of our histories. Even mundane items like multi-page ads give a glimpse into what people were buying way back when, and how the sellers were marketing it. That, by itself, might not say much, but in context it adds color and contour to a bigger picture.
My thanks to the Record-Eagle librarians, whose efforts made my own so much easier that day. Now it’s back into the folder and Shaw-Walker cabinet, hopefully for future perusal or, better still, a digitization project.